Estimating and analyzing the impact or load of services on resources is an important task to consider for ensuring successful operation of the services. In today's competitive and dynamic business environment, organizations need to continually evaluate the effectiveness of operational processes and infrastructures and look for ways to transform the process to achieve better service and utilization. In order to achieve such results there is a need for a capacity assessment modeling tool that can accurately assess the effectiveness of existing service components, evaluate the impact of services and potential changes to the process and identify opportunities for improvement.
Take for example communication networks that are widely used for exchange of messages and transactions. The messages and transactions in these networks often include complex schema built upon the exchange of specific sequences of messages in commercial applications such as web-browsing, audio/video teleconferences, on-line banking, catalogue-shopping, etc. The success of the applications running on the network depends on the ability of the network to provide appropriate guarantees regarding the integrity and performance requirements of transactions. In light of such systems, network planning and service analysis becomes an important issue to consider. And the ability to accurately model the services, for example, IP based communication services, and their impact on network resources such as estimating the load on the service components is desirable.
As another example, the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) enables operators and service providers to control bearers, sessions and charging of multimedia services using Internet protocol. IMS is designed to enable smooth interoperation between wireless and wireline networks, mobile and fixed networks, and circuit-switched and packet-switched technologies in a manner independent of the access technology. Evaluating the load and stress on IMS core network components can become complex, given the wide range of services that can be offered and the number of network components involved. For instance, services can involve complex interactions between IMS-compliant and non-IMS networks (like the PSTN), with different services requiring differing levels of involvement from the IMS components (for example, application that do not inter-work with the legacy PSTN do not make use of the Media Gateway function) and different amounts of processing and bandwidth at each of these components. Therefore, it is desirable to have a method and system that enable the operators, service providers and equipment manufacturers to estimate and evaluate the operational load that various service components can support (or anticipated loads incurred by planned services) for a wide range of services and applications. It is also desirable to understand financial, security, and quality-of-experience impacts that services may have at design time.